There are many environments in which multiple tools and disposables are used, including for example operation rooms, aircraft hangars, garages, or the like.
An operation room is a facility in which intrusive operations are performed on patients. Typically, multiple people participate in an operation, including a chief surgeon, sometimes an assistant surgeon, an anesthesiologist, a scrub nurse, and a circulating nurse. The participating personnel members use multiple surgical items, such as scalpels, forceps, and others, varying according to the surgery being, performed.
Intensive efforts are invested in keeping track of all surgical items and disposables, in order to make sure no item unintentionally remains inside the patients body. Therefore careful counting is performed before, during and after the operation.
Counting the surgical items is a tedious job and requires intensive resources, including mental resources, personnel time and down-time of the operating room. Counting the surgical items towards the end of an operation also increases the time the patients body is open with the associated risks.
In addition, counting is not always error-free, and in many cases surgical items end up being left within the patients body, causing severe damage and even death.
Another problem relates to the life cycle of surgical items. For example, reusable surgical items used in an operation have to be sanitized or sterilized prior to further usage. Other constraints may relate to maintenance operations required for the surgical items, for example, a blade may have to be sharpened after every predetermined number of operations in which it is used. In another example, surgical items that have been used in an operation performed on a patient with a contagious disease may require extra sterilization before further usage, or the like. Making sure that each surgical item is used and maintained properly also imposes expenses and requires resources, including record keeping and tracking, manual labor and the like.
In U.S. Pat. No. 8,193,938 to Halberthal et al dated Jun. 5, 2012 there is disclosed a computerized system and method for keeping track of tools, wherein each tool is uniquely identified. Identifying the tools is performed using a Radio Frequency (RF) identification transducer tag that is attached to the tools. The use of a computerized system improves the ability to track the tools and reduce system overhead.
Attaching identifying tags to surgical items imposes a number of challenges. The tag needs to adhere to the surgical item for the entire lifetime of the surgical item, the tag should not interfere with the use of the surgical item, the tag should be identifiable regardless of the orientation of the surgical item and even when surrounded by other surgical items.
Application Ser. No. 14/269,155 to Guy Dor et al dated May 4, 2014 the disclosure of which is incorporated herein by reference discloses construction of an identification tag and attaching it to a tool. Generally the attachment process is performed by laser welding to prevent damage to the tag from excess heating. The welding process generally requires that a skilled person perform the attachment process to prevent damage to the tag while being attached.
The current attaching process is time consuming and expensive. In an environment with many tools/surgical items a lot of skilled technicians may be required for attaching identification tags to the tools. Thus it is of interest to reduce the attaching time and simplify it so that even a non-skilled worker may quickly attach identification tags.
It should be noted that government regulatory authorities (e.g. the FDA) are in the process of introducing regulatory requirement requiring medical facilities to mark tools with unique device identifiers (UDI). Thus it is of interest to simplify the attachment process to reduce the overhead and risk of not being in compliance with the regulations.